Relating to Truly Mentally Ill People(Aspies vs. NTs)

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It all depends on the personality of the people.

I've known some schizophrenic people who were generally nice people to be around, one of them was one of the original members of the Boston Punk scene in the 70's, and he had an entire wall sized shelving unit full of live soundboard tapes from early shows, as well as lots of studio excerpts. I learned a lot from him, yet at the same time, I never saw him off of his medication.

On the other extreme, one of my first encounters with a schizophrenic person was with a guy who seemed OK, until I was told by another kid to say something to him, and then he attacked me, until he was dragged off and pinned down by four adults.

Yet others that I have met had very strange paranoid and sometimes fantastic logic that I couldn't process.

Most of the Bipolar people that I have met were generally ok, though I've only seen one person that I knew was bipolar off of his medication, and that was a harrowing experience.

Also, incidentally, I have unipolar depression, and have been going through a major depressive bout for the past few months.

At the same time as well, I lived with someone that had AS and the friction of that interaction was due to a collision of divergent interests.

He was much more politically active with radical left politics than I was, and this extended to not using electrical power due to the fact that the power supplied to the city that we lived in came from a nuclear power plant, (Maine Yankee) and that power plant utilised uranium control rods that were from South Africa, and he refused to support that regime. -- He actually got into legal trouble over this when he turned off the mains power at both a local whole foods Co-op, as well as the cities' public library.

I OTOH, had an electric guitar that I practiced quite a lot in those days, and there was friction between the two of us because of this, as we could never really come to fully understand either's position.

Yeah I forgot to mention, a lot of people I've met who're diagnosed with schizophrenia show no signs of paranoia at all, but are just generally illogical and/or confused.

Anbuend, you are lucky you do find the ones who are not paranoid and I hope you continue to find ones who aren't.

I was that way when I started watching Jerry Springer, showed me a lot about some of the fringe cultures and the like.

I'm curious if that might have been Post Traumatic Stress Disorder instead of Schizophrenia (the one who had to be pinned down).

I was that way when I started watching Jerry Springer, showed me a lot about some of the fringe cultures and the like.

That happened in the North Dakota State Hospital when I was 11. He definately had schizophrenia according to the staff there. A year later after the guy turned 18, the hospital moved him from the adolescent wards to the high security ward, where, (sadly) he probably still is to this day.

This being said, I don't know if the encounter that I had with him was due to his schizophrenia, or whether it was brought about by years of abuse from other kids at the institution compounded by neglect from the staff. --In North Dakota, the solution was for parents to commit kids to the State Hospital when they were 'unruly', whether or not they they had any psychological/neurologica/developmental disorder or not.

That makes it sound almost like I would be unlucky to know some very nice and interesting people I do happen to know, who also happen to have trouble with paranoia.

One woman in particular comes to mind, she worked for a long time as a staff person for a friend who uses a wheelchair. This person was also a client of the local mental "health" agency. Really nice woman, but very beaten down by years in the psych system. Which made her unable to summon up the courage to leave her boyfriend, who not only mistreated her, but cheated on her with her case manager. (And yes, that part is not paranoia, the local psych agency is that corrupt and my friend, who does not have reality trouble, witnessed all this over time. So did many of the people who worked there in lower-level positions.)

At any rate, she could do a lot of things my friend could not do, on a physical level, so she did a lot of those things, My friend had a pretty good grasp on reality, and if she started having those things that aren't full paranoia but little echoes of it (basically, a tendency to see situations as skewed against her and making connections that didn't make sense, which is how her thinking in between the really bad spells), my friend would find ways to tell her and she was glad about that. She was never, even during the bad parts, remotely mean or violent, just terrified and sometimes self-destructive.

I remember listening to another guy talk about how when he got really paranoid, he was just too scared to do anything, so he'd just sit there, and then his failure to move out of fear would get regarded as catatonia. One (unusually good at his job) psychiatric worker actually saw that was what was happening (rather than an inability to move), and made things as comfortable as he could for him and told him that whenever he was ready he could move to show that he was in there, that nothing bad would happen to him if he did, and that there was no pressure or anything, and he had a flash of rationality telling him that the guy was trustworthy, and did move a little in response to that, and that saved him a lot of trouble later on and got him realizing that terrible things weren't all going to start happening. If he had been treated the way people in that state of fear are normally treated, he might not have ever come to that realization. (One person I know who has periodic reality trouble pointed out that if someone's paranoid, and the first thing you do is jump them and stick a needle in their butt, that's going to make them even more terrified than they already are, it just confirms their fears.)

So it's not really that I've never known a lot of people who got paranoid, it's just that I've known a lot of other people with that label who weren't paranoid at all. And most of the people I've known who did get paranoid, were more harmful to themselves than anyone else, and many were also being abused rather than the other way around. (And often didn't know it or fight it in any way because they had come to expect such treatment.)

When you were 11, the definition of schizophrenia was much broader, and much more commonly applied to children. (The vast -- and I mean vast -- majority of whom are now known as autistic or other things. I know a few people who were institutionalized during that time period, and all of them say that most of the people diagnosed as schizophrenic at that time would not have even fit modern definitions of it, and literally had everything from (what would now be considered) depression to autism to PTSD to whatever. The definition of psychosis was at least as oriented to social withdrawal as it was to other things at that time.)

I don't have the energy after my last post to get into how the label is now being questioned as to whether it's even meaningful or whether it's a collection of totally unrelated conditions. But it is slowly more and more being considered to be basically a hundred-year-old diagnostic mistake.

I used to lash out at anyone who touched me and it was largely related to being in an incredibly violent institutional environment. (Violence more on the part of the staff -- I was only rarely brutalized by other patients. Among staff it was unfortunately a rarity in some of those places to find someone who wasn't brutal, some of them developed a real cultural of violence.) I was far less violent than usual before being exposed to that environment, and have finally after years away from there become less violent than usual again.

I understand your experiences, Anbuend. Sounds like your friend had a better experience with the psych system than some. It didn't bring out "meanness".
The hospital near my house was pretty bad in it's asylum days, when people who were thought to be incurable were basically stuck there indefinitely. This was before the days of deinstitutionalization. I realize now people recieving treatment might have a much better prognosis. The people I was around growing up were confined during the dark days of the mental health system, when people were warehoused inside barracks and pretty much ignored and thought to be hopeless.

One family in particular, sadly, is one of those mental health schizophrenic cliches ever bit as terrifying as the stories out of the newspapers, the ones that get publicized. This is the type of schizophrenic I have encountered, the destructive type who is more dangerous to others than themselves. People that jump on others and attack others for whatever reasons and have done horrible things to their family members, one even killed a family member.

I guess some of this can be blamed on how the system used to be. I admit the schizophrenics I have encountered who were really paranoid and "craziest" were all old enough to be my parents.

I know what you mean, I work with over 65 years old seniors and appreciate their individual need to understand complicated subjects in all area of debility. I love them, they are so brave to live on.

Merle

Nope, meanness level is not necessarily correlated with how bad the experiences are (and the idea that all the problems the psych system used to have are over, has been around for decades and is no more true now than it was in 1975). It'd be best just not to try to explain individual differences away like that.

And the thing is, for every person diagnosed with schizophrenia who does something awful, there are far more people without any labels at all, doing something awful, and yet they don't get considered "that kind of NT" or whatever, they're just considered "that kind of person". Because the stereotype exists against people with psych labels and any one or two instances people see, they believe confirms it on some level (which is how stereotypes work in general, but it's also why most people I know from the psych system won't talk about it openly).

Yeah, I've experienced this from people treating me like "that kind of autistic" when it was inconvenient for them to do their jobs. I have friends who've had various psych labels, who have met with the same and similar.

From experience I say that the ASD has anything to do with tolerance and behaviour towards others in terms of ideals. There are autistic people and those with other disorders who display the same behaviour of ignorance and excluding towards a wide range of disorders and disabilities as other people without disorders do.

I can't relate to people with other disorders or any people with or without autism actually.

But from the replies in this topic, it sounds more as if it was about how we get along with people with other disorders, specifically with their disorder (not with their personality)?

I treat everyone like a normal person/bring the same attitude to people regardless of disorders. I'm fine with people of pretty much every diagnosis so far. I have experience with PDs, unstable moods, OCD and not also with behavioural issues, LDs and MRs. I find people with no disorders just as challenging.

I think that autistic people are probably more able than NTs to empathize with mentally ill people. After all both groups are not 'normal'.

Most people, autistic or NT, find it easier to empathize with people who have depression or bipolar disorder than those who have schizophrenia. Depression or bipolar is something people can understand as feelings of sadness and/or elation greatly magnified. Unlike the hallucinations or delusions of schizophrenia, which is the general idea of what schizoprenia is.

I think many autistic people lack the social discernment that classes mentally ill people as 'pariahs'. They also often lack social fear and can get themselves into dangerous situations with said 'mentally ill' people.

I don't think any amount of wordy PC philosophy negates personal experience.